Re: Bass guitar in Celtic music
Originally Posted by
M.Marmot
The danger here, as always, is in proscribing a very narrow and linear path of musical 'tradition' ... if we decide to exclude drums and brass, not because they were not historically proven to be used by musicians and enjoyed by audiences and dancers, but because it does not serve our thesis, then we can only be driven to a foregone conclusion.
Likewise, to ignore the synth heavy music produced in the eighties and nineties, not because it did not stem directly from the tradition, but because it's not to our tastes, can only cause any exchange to shut down.
I buggered off out of this thread because I figured "well, I've offended enough members for one go" but - maybe not.
Dagger, I consider you to be a splendidly admirable and deeply affecting musician who's obviously deeply steeped in the tradition - that's why I bought your album as soon as I'd viewed one Youtube video. Moreover, there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of drums (I have zero argument with bass) in trad music. I just didn't like that piece because of the drumming.
Now, when you start talking about heavy synths as with Clannad and later Capercaillie for example - ugh. The exchange from my end certainly does shut down. What some call progression seems to me like its very opposite: simplifying and to paraphrase Woody Allen, "flavor removal" of the music. There is nothing "narrow" about the tradition; people who find it narrow are perhaps (and understandably given the last half-century of Western musical culture) addicted to novelty for its own sake, which I consider to be an unfortunate, even crippling distraction from genuinely profound enjoyment as well as from actually learning the music.
Anyway this has been a fascinating thread in so many ways. I saw a Youtube post today calling the music of Flook mechanical and boring, which runs exactly counter to my feelings about them. I guess we're just all wired differently and it never ceases to amaze me just how differently sometimes. Good wishes to all here.
"But wasn't it all stupid nonsense, rot, gibberish, and criminally fraudulent nincompoopery?"
- Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver
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